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Lucasfilm has finally revealed the specs for the forthcoming Star Wars releases...

Further Details:
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has announced the Blu-ray release of Star Wars: The Complete Saga for the 12th of September. There will be three options available to consumers, including individual boxed sets for the prequel and original trilogies, along with a boxed set containing all six films and three additional discs packed with bonus content. Technical details are thin on the ground but the press release mentions DTS 6.1 audio, which we take to mean Master Audio. All announced extras can be found below, along with cover art.

DISC SIX – STAR WARS: EPISODE VI RETURN OF THE JEDI

Audio Commentary with George Lucas, Carrie Fisher, Ben Burtt and Dennis MurenAudio Commentary from Archival Interviews with Cast and Crew

DISC SEVEN – NEW! STAR WARS ARCHIVES: EPISODES I-III

Deleted, Extended and Alternate Scenes

Prop, Maquette and Costume Turnarounds

Matte Paintings and Concept Art

Supplementary Interviews with Cast and Crew

A Flythrough of the Lucasfilm Archives and More

DISC EIGHT – NEW! STAR WARS ARCHIVES: EPISODES IV-VI

Deleted, Extended and Alternate Scenes

Prop, Maquette and Costume Turnarounds

Matte Paintings and Concept Art

Supplementary Interviews with Cast and Crew

And More

DISC NINE – THE STAR WARS DOCUMENTARIES

Star Warriors (2007, Color, Apx. 84 Minutes) – Some Star Wars fans want to collect action figures...these fans want to be action figures! A tribute to the 501st Legion, a global organization of Star Wars costume enthusiasts, this insightful documentary shows how the super-fan club promotes interest in the films through charity and volunteer work at fundraisers and high-profile special events around the world.

A Conversation with the Masters: The Empire Strikes Back 30 Years Later (2010, Color, Apx. 25 Minutes) – George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Lawrence Kasdan and John Williams look back on the making of The Empire Strikes Back in this in-depth retrospective from Lucasfilm created to help commemorate the 30th anniversary of the movie. The masters discuss and reminisce about one of the most beloved films of all time.

Star Wars Spoofs (2011, Color, Apx. 91 Minutes) – The farce is strong with this one! Enjoy a hilarious collection of Star Wars spoofs and parodies that have been created over the years, including outrageous clips from Family Guy, The Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother and more - and don't miss "Weird Al" Yankovic's one-of-a-kind music video tribute to The Phantom Menace!

The Making of Star Wars (1977, Color, Apx. 49 Minutes) – Learn the incredible behind-the-scenes story of how the original Star Wars movie was brought to the big screen in this fascinating documentary hosted by C-3PO and R2-D2. Includes interviews with George Lucas and appearances by Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.

The Empire Strikes Back: SPFX (1980, Color, Apx. 48 Minutes) – Learn the secrets of making movies in a galaxy far, far away. Hosted by Mark Hamill, this revealing documentary offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the amazing special effects that transformed George Lucas' vision for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back into reality!

Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi (1983, Color, Apx. 48 Minutes) – Go behind the scenes - and into the costumes - as production footage from Return of the Jedi is interspersed with vintage monster movie clips in this in-depth exploration of the painstaking techniques utilized by George Lucas to create the classic creatures and characters seen in the film. Hosted and narrated by Carrie Fisher and Billie Dee Williams.

Anatomy of a Dewback (1997, Color, Apx. 26 Minutes) – See how some of the special effects in Star Wars became even more special two decades later! George Lucas explains and demonstrates how his team transformed the original dewback creatures from immovable rubber puppets (in the original 1977 release) to seemingly living, breathing creatures for the Star Wars 1997 Special Edition update.

Star Wars Tech (2007, Color, Apx. 46 Minutes) – Exploring the technical aspects of Star Wars vehicles, weapons and gadgetry, Star Wars Tech consults leading scientists in the fields of physics, prosthetics, lasers, engineering and astronomy to examine the plausibility of Star Wars technology based on science as we know it today.

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Wasn’t STAR WARS born released in discrete 70mm six-track DOLBY STEREO so it would only been nice of Fox and Lucasfilm to honour that in DOLBY TrueHD

This bluray fails no DOLBY TrueHD what is it with dts hd master audio stealing the glory from DOLBY gragggghhhh

No isolated John Williams score in DOLBY DIGITAL 6channel way to go George Milking Lucas I think I’ll take a pass on this in September and spend my money on cat food rather than something unproductive! I might buy it and give it to my cat to use in his litter box because that is what it deserves.

The extras are just pitiful! I would have but each film with second and third disc of extras

Then have the extra, extras with at least 4 or 5 discs so this is what we get for our money then?

I'm not 100% on the covers and the Saga one looks like a Digibook instead of a gatefold Digipak (which would have more artwork). The extras seem okay but a lot of stuff as gone AWOL. I'm assuming that all those retro documentary's were shot on film. Some of the stuff seems a tad obscure half way down the list I was expecting Red Letter Media's TPM review to be included!

The 'and more' seems to be the most interesting extras hopefully they'll bow us a way. I was hoping for some extended cuts....

The question whether they use the 2004 DVD Masters for the OT is my main concern though, as the article points out we may have lost a lot of detail that can't be recovered.

The additional content (I know I'm commenting on stuff sight unseen) just seems a bit haphazard. Not that I really want to see more behind the scenes of the prequels but 'they' couldn't get all the prequel documentaries included could they? Instead we get (for example) an 84 odd minute doc on collectors and fans who like to dress up. Not got anything against those fans (or the doc) but it seems to be there at the exclusion of other content. Early days though. There may be more content not in the release. "And more...." could mean anything.

The Alien Anthology still seems to beat this hands down for sheer thoroughness though.

I don't mind the saga art. Ties the two trilogies together nicely through the common planet of Tatooine. I wonder if the saga box simply contains the other two inside, along with a third for the three bonus discs?

I can't get over how bad that Saga cover is and I can't help thinking they should have just gone for the Phantom Menace teaser poster rather a child's bible illustration. I'm really hoping some retailer somewhere will do an alternative cover or just some sort of slip to cover it up on my shelf

Gabe Powers wrote: Really? I have to keep my Phantom Menace DVD for the documentary? I'm reading it wrong, right?

According to Blu-Ray.com it says ADDITIONAL CONTENT under both the Prequel Trilogy and Original Trilogy extras list. Maybe Empire of Dreams and The Beginning (both excellent documentaries) will be included here?

Marcus1138 wrote: I've only got about 20% downloaded so far on the May 4th site but there certainly seems to be a bit of cover art for at least episodes I-III in there. I'm hoping for more as and when it "unlocks"

Well, I did have it on pre-order but may cancel it now. I wasn't expecting anything like original theatricals and don't mind that it doesn't have them, but the extra features are in my view are particularly poor. I shall wait and see if more details are given later on but for now my finger is poised over the cancel order button.

Chris Gould wrote: Gotta say, bit disappointed with the technical details in the press release. No mention of video codecs or audio options beyond DTS Surround... Extras are about what I expected though. I'm disappointed with the tech specs too, but to be honest I really didn't expect there to be anything more detailed than a listing of the extras. I'm interesting in finding out if the original films were sourced from the 2004 DVD masters or not. Here's an interesting article from a couple of years back that goes into detail on the then current state of the films. I'm afraid that what we'll end up getting are Blu-rays based off of the same seven year-old 1080 masters done for the 2004 DVD release. The article goes into more specifics and issues, including the color correction done, but here's the biggie as far as the resolution is concerned:

"...the negative (for Star Wars) was scanned only in HD resolution of 1080p, in 10-bit RGB. This was a state worse than the primitive 2K scans ILM had done for the SE. By contrast, when Blade Runner was restored and enhanced in 2007, the live-action was scanned at 4K, the normal standard, and the visual effect shots at 8K. Godfather's 2008 restoration was scanned at 4K for the entire film, while Wizard of Oz's 2009 release was done at 8K. Why Lucas chose to source his master from a paltry 1080 HD scan is hard to fathom, especially when 4K was long in place as the standard, with 6K and 8K looming on the horizon as a viable replacement since data storage was becoming cheaper. One reason may be because Lucas was shooting the two prequels--Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith--on the Sony CineAlta, which itself was 1080 (being the first generation of HD feature-film cameras). This is another undoable element of the prequels--filmed on 1080p HD, they have, at the most, less than half the resolution of the 35mm original trilogy, with some arguing that 35mm resolves 5000 lines, meaning they have just under 1/5 the resolution (Phantom Menace was shot in 35mm, but then scanned in 2K--which is still an improvement over the following two films). With the new 2004 SE existing partly to link the six films, this was indeed the case as the original trilogy was lowered in resolution to that of the first three episodes. Ironically, as Lucas moved into more "high tech" digital arenas, the quality of the image slowly declined, going from a 35mm original, to a partly-2K 1997 SE and then a fully-1080p 2004 SE. According to Videography, the negatives were scanned on a Cintel C-Reality telecine, at 1920x1080 resolution, in 4:4:4 RGB, recorded to Sony SR tape."

Marcus1138 wrote: Have they confirmed CGI yoda for Menace on this release then?

The work was done back in about 2002, when a clip of it was included on one of the documentaries for Attack of the Clones, so it's pretty safe to assume that they'll include it on the Blu transfer, as the original Yoda in The Phantom Menace was embarassingly bad.

We're a little miffed that they have gone to the effort of having a 90 minute look at Star Wars spoofs and they left off From Star Wars To Jedi: The Making of a Saga (they have put the Classic Creatures documentary on, but it's bloody awful).

We had a feeling that Lucas would provide a lot of information, but leave out the specific details of the transfers. It is widely known that the lousy Yoda puppet created for The Phantom Menace is going to be replaced by CGI, but it will be interesting to see if Lucas has gotten ILM to re-do the subpar CG work on the second lap of the Pod Race, along with the substandard CG work on the Coroscant fly-over.

We at least hope that the errors that plagued the DVD releases of the Original Trilogy have been rectified, including miscoloured lightsabres, reversed music-tracks, etc.